Yoram Bauman, "the world's first and only stand-up economist", has appeared at venues ranging from the New York Improv to the annual meeting of the American Economic Association and also on YouTube, where his videos have over 500,000 hits. Visit his Web site: standupeconomist.com.

Great, Ross, what is it? The hallmark of science is testable predictions, so give me a data set and make a prediction about it. How about the satellite data from Roy Spencer and John Christy? Roy Spencer ever provides a handy prediction (made in late 2008):

If the PDO [Pacific Decadal Oscillation] has recently entered into a new, negative phase, then we can expect that global average temperatures, which haven’t risen for at least seven years now, could actually start to fall in the coming years. The recovery of Arctic sea ice now underway might be an early sign that this is indeed happening. The next few years of satellite data might provide some very interesting insights into whether the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is indeed a major force in climate change.

Are you willing to make this same prediction? And if the PDO (which Spencer calls his “favorite candidate” for a non-anthropogenic natural cause for global warming) does stay in a negative phase and temperatures nonetheless rise as predicted by the IPCC, are you going to admit that you were wrong? Or are you going to continue to avoid making any testable predictions?

Please tell me you like this data set (or can provide me with another one) and that you like Spencer’s prediction (or can provide me with another one). Otherwise I’m going to lump you in with the “birthers and truthers“.

PS. The issue above is what I want to focus on, but let’s take a quick look at one of the nine pieces of evidence that you use to back up your claim that “the collapse of the global warming paradigm is… happening daily”: India withdraws from the IPCC, an article dated Friday Feb 5 2010. There’s only one problem with this piece of evidence: It’s not true. The headline indeed says “India quitting IPCC”, but the body of the article doesn’t really support that statement. And this Feb 9 Wall Street Journal piece says that “Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed support for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its leader, Rajendra Pachauri, at a local energy conference in New Delhi Friday”. (Don’t believe the WSJ? Watch the video yourself.) Now, let’s see if you’re honest enough to admit that you were wrong in claiming that India withdrew from the IPCC. Or maybe you’d like to bet $100 (or $1,000?) that on January 1 2011 India will still be listed as a member of the IPCC? (See here, linked from here. )